Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti, in full Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti, (born Nov. 29, 1797, Bergamo, Cisalpine Republic—died April 8, 1848, Bergamo, Lombardy, Austrian Empire), Italian opera composer whose numerous operas in both Italian and French represent a transitional stage in operatic development between Rossini and Verdi. Among his major works are Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), La fille du régiment (1840), and La favorite (1840). In his serious operas he developed considerably the dramatic weight and emotional content of the genre, and his comic operas have a sparkling wit and gaiety all their own.

Early life.

The youngest of three sons of the caretaker of the monte di pieta (the municipal pawnshop), Donizetti began his musical studies with Giovanni Simone Mayr, a Bavarian priest who was musical director of Sta. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo’s chief church, and also a successful composer of opera. As a choirboy Donizetti did not shine, but Mayr perceived in him a nascent musical ability and secured his entry into the Liceo Filarmonico (the music school) at Bologna, where he had a thorough training in fugue and counterpoint. His father hoped he would become a church composer, but, though he did compose a vast quantity of sacred music, his natural instinct was for the theatre.

Donizetti scored his first success with Enrico di Borgogna, which first appeared in 1818 at the Teatro San Luca, in Venice, and during the next 12 years he composed no fewer than 31 operas, most of them produced at Naples and now forgotten. In 1830 his Anna Bolena, produced in Milan, carried his fame abroad to all the European capitals and eventually across the Atlantic. Two years later he scored another lasting success with L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love), a comedy full of charm and character with a libretto by Felice Romani, the best theatre poet of the day. Lucrezia Borgia (1833), also with a libretto by Romani, consolidated his reputation at La Scala in Milan and elsewhere. Like the opera composers Gioacchino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini before him, he next gravitated to Paris, where his Marino Faliero, though not a failure, suffered from comparison with Bellini’s I Puritani, produced a few weeks before. Donizetti then returned to Naples for the production of his tragic masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor, on Sept. 26, 1835.

In 1828 Donizetti had married Virginia Vasseli, the sister of one of his closest friends in Rome; they made their home in Naples. He was deeply devoted to her and never really recovered his spirits after her death, soon after the stillbirth of a son, in 1837. His distress was exacerbated by the fact that none of the three children born to them survived birth. It seems clear that syphilis, to which Donizetti himself later succumbed, was already taking its toll of his family.

Donizetti continued to work in Naples until 1838, when municipal censors objected to the production of his Poliuto, which dealt with a Christian martyr, on the ground that the sacred subject was unsuitable for the stage. He thereupon returned to Paris, where the field had been cleared for him by Bellini’s early death and Rossini’s retirement. There he revived some of his best operas, though Lucrezia Borgia had to be withdrawn because of objections by Victor Hugo, on whose drama the libretto was based. Poliuto was produced in 1840 as Les Martyrs with a French text by Eugène Scribe. It was preceded two months earlier by the opéra comiqueLa fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment), which gained enormous popularity over the years through the performances of the leading sopranos of the day, including Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Emma Albani, and other divas of the 19th century. Later in the same year the Paris Opéra produced La favorite, Donizetti’s first essay in French grand opera.

Bartolomeo Merelli, a fellow pupil of Donizetti, was now director of La Scala and also of the Kärnthnerthor Theater, in Vienna. He engaged Donizetti to compose an opera for La Scala. The work, Maria Padilla, was produced in 1841 only a few weeks before the famous premiere of Verdi’s Nabucco. Merelli also commissioned an opera for his Viennese theatre. There, Linda di Chamounix, a romanticopera semiseria, was produced in 1842 and dedicated to the empress Maria Anna. Donizetti had already been brought to the notice of the emperor Ferdinand I by his chancellor, Prince Metternich, and had conducted Rossini’s Stabat Mater in his presence. He now received the appointment of official composer to the Emperor, which obliged him to be in Vienna for six months in the year but left him free to work elsewhere during the rest. At the same time Rossini, who had always furthered Donizetti’s interests in Paris and entrusted to him the first performance of his Stabat Mater at Bologna, urged him to undertake the vacant directorship of the Liceo in that city. But Donizetti felt that he could not undertake this responsibility and preferred to continue his profitable operatic career. Back in Paris, he produced at the Théâtre Italien the delightful and witty comic opera, Don Pasquale.

Physical breakdown

But Donizetti was already in the grip of his fatal disease. He produced his last important opera, Dom Sébastien, with a libretto by Scribe, at the Paris Opéra in 1843 under the strain of constant headaches and occasional lapses of mental capacity. He suddenly aged, lost his good looks and his equability of temper, which had hitherto seen him through the trials of operatic production. Dom Sébastien, though unfavourably reviewed in the press, was nonetheless a success with the public.

The remaining years were a story of degeneration into hopeless insanity. As a patient in a private asylum near Paris, he had considerable difficulties with the French police, who were supported by the doctors; he was at last taken home to Bergamo by his devoted nephew Andrea, son of his eldest brother. He lingered on until April 8, 1848, a victim of general paralysis of the syphilitic insane, deprived of willpower, speech, and physical control. It was a pitiable end for a gay and handsome man who, unlike Bellini, was never envious of the successes of other composers and at all times displayed an openhearted generosity. To the French composer Hector Berlioz, for example, whose criticisms in Le Journal des Débats were consistently hostile, he spontaneously sent a letter of introduction to Prince Metternich, when Berlioz was about to leave for Vienna.

Donizetti always won more favour with the public than with the critics. During his lifetime his success was enormous and the rewards considerable. His popularity continued until the end of the century, but by 1914 his operas had almost disappeared from the repertory, overshadowed by the more substantial masterpieces of Verdi and Richard Wagner. In the 1950s there was a revival of interest in his works, after which it seemed unlikely that, at least, Lucia di Lammermoor, L’elisir d’amore, and Don Pasquale would be allowed to pass into oblivion.

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